Ellen Lundgren

Cat & Dog Timelapse from Ellen on Vimeo.

Two 4×6″ commissions of a cat and a dog as Christmas gifts. Forgot to record the 2nd half of the dog drawing, so sorry for that.

Visit http://helloellenellen.etsy.com!

I’ve listed a new Treasury listing made completely of objects made with steel. I hope you like it!

Life is crazy. I don’t have midterms. Just projects. Multiple projects for each of my 4 current classes. What is food? Sleep? Hah!

Nah, actually, I’m doing pretty well on sleep thanks to my anti-anxiety medication. It’s made my life so much better as well. I’m so much more attentive, relaxed and productive with my SSRI prescription and I can’t imagine why I didn’t try them sooner.

Lately I’ve been inspired by the figure in my artwork for my printmaking class. Printmaking is an entirely new technique for me, but so far I’m really enjoying it. The assignments as far as content are completely open to whatever we want to do other than what technique we should be using. I was a struggle at first coming up with a concept to work with, but I finally decided to work with ‘identity.’ I’ve been working on a series of self-portraits somewhat abstracted so it may or may not be me. The ideas are still a bit rough, but an example of a diptych I printed are hardground etchings of my hair.

No images yet, but perhaps I’ll post some later. I’m trying to get this concept to carry over to my Image Studio class as well, but they’re such different techniques, I’m having some difficulty. Oh well, it’s something to ponder through the second part of the semester…

First day of classes. I have a pretty good schedule. A potential new job lined up, and a few commissions with flexible deadlines. Always nice.

I’m excited about these commissions though. One is for the mother of a friend of mine at school, so I get to draw this cute picture of him as a kid with his younger sister (always good for lighthearted teasing). His mother is also a greatly encouraging and lovely person, who I have oddly never met, but we’ve talked a lot on Facebook. Ahh, modern technology. I’m always fascinated with how relationships are facilitated online.

The other commission is actually from my mother. She has sent me a bunch of scans of old family pictures to choose from, and I get to select three to draw, that will then hang in 4×6″ art show in my hometown. I’m excited to draw some of these older portraits of great grandparents. I’m also quite fascinated with family history, and to draw these makes me feel so much closer to them.

Well, lunch time!

First real update in a while. This summer has gotten away from me. I’m moving apartments tomorrow, and classes start in a couple weeks. Here is a time-lapse video of my recent commission. The song is “Overboard” by Ingrid Michaelson.

Portrait Drawing Time-lapse #2 from Ellen on Vimeo.

The Freethinkers of WWU is promoting an open forum for discussing various views on religion. There will be a panel which will consist of several different folks representing their respective beliefs including Humanism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. If you’re in or near Bellingham, Washington and are interested in finding out more about this event, or are simply curious about an interfaith/humanist forum, please check out the event page on Facebook:

Ask Us Anything: A Multi-Religious Discussion Panel

Alain de Botton really loves architecture. He’s not alone in that. I’m particularly fond of architecture as well. When I was at college and uni, architecture was one of the things I particularly enjoyed studying in my art history class. I learned all about post and lintel construction, various flavors of arches and vaults, all the vocabulary of church construction from apse to narthex, classical revival, gothic revival, blahdy-blah revival, ranch style, and so on and so forth. Buildings are indeed art, and like art, architecture can be plain or extravagant, ugly or beautiful, filled with messages and meaning or simply l’art pour l’art. But while I tend to look at art for art’s sake (I was never very good at interpreting meaning in art), de Botton wants the art of architecture to be didactic. Art and architecture should have something to say about their time and place, and have something to teach us as well. In trying to get behind de Botton’s reasoning for wanting to build an “atheist temple”, I sat down and watched his three-part series The Perfect Home based on his book “The Architecture of Happiness”. It did give me a bit of insight into what the purpose of an atheist temple would be. But is an atheist temple necessarily a good idea?

Civilizations have distinct styles to them. Architecture will reflect not only the time and place of a culture, but their mores, their ideals, their notions of what it means to be human in that era and society. The ancient Egyptians were grandiose with their geometric architecture of cylinder columns, rectangular sculptures, and (of course) pyramids. Greek civilization was all about the column, and Roman civilization all about the arch. Gothic architecture was inspired by the earlier Romanesque, but with the added technological achievements of the pointed arch and flying buttress. Neoclassical looked back to the architecture of the Greeks and Romans as a way to express the 18th century values of democracy and reason. Early 20th century architecture looked toward the future with the hope of a brighter tomorrow, building towering skyscrapers, designing streamlined structures which evoked the wonder and promise of emerging technologies.

But when tomorrow got here, it wasn’t what we were expecting. Instead of flying cars and teleporters, we got disillusionment as governments stripped the people of civil liberties. People are living in poverty in so-called “first world” countries, and there is an ever widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. In the United States, infrastructure is collapsing and little is being done to renew it, let alone make it grander. Transcontinental high-speed rail is still a fanciful dream, and urban sprawl continues unabated at an alarming rate. Tomorrow has failed us, and we have no reason to build grand architecture for the modern age because we have lost our hope in modernity. Instead, we’ve begun looking to the past for “golden ages” that we can imagine to have been a better place and time. We retreat to the familiarity and safety of the past because the future has become a scary and forbidding place.

This retreat into the past isn’t the same kind of looking back into history that happened during the neoclassical 18th century. At that time, the architecture of the ancient Greeks and Romans was used for inspiration, modified with contemporary 18th century technologies and sensibilities to create something new out of something old. Neoclassical architecture, despite looking like ancient construction, was actually quite modern for its time because people were building for the period they were living in rather than trying to re-create an imaginary idealized Rome or Athens. What is happening now, as de Botton points out in his television program, is people are looking back to the past in an effort to escape their disillusionment with the Now. People design buildings with architecture from the past because modernity, and the architecture of modernity in 20th century designs, has become symbolic of the abysmal failure of progress. In the interest of saving time and money by making buildings fast and cheap, buildings become strictly utilitarian with little regard for outward appearance and absolutely no regard for how a twenty storey concrete slab of apartments would affect the mental health of its tenants, let alone the aesthetic appeal for the community. Cookie-cutter homes punctuated with pig snout two-car garages pepper the landscapes of suburbia, and the only thing that makes them discernible from one another is the house number. Even in religious buildings, architecture has gotten lazy and uninspired. In the United States, the architecture of many churches seems to focus only on what is utilitarian, with very little grandeur on their facades. Larger churches and mega churches often look more like warts on the landscape in the same way that megalomarts such as Costco and Wal-Mart already are. In larger cities there are churches more like the cathedrals one would see in Europe, yet even these structures can sometimes seem lackluster.

Alain de Botton says that it is usually places of worship which often wield the most impressive architecture, but this isn’t always the case. Many secular public buildings can and do have beautiful architecture, though de Botton would argue that what is lacking in these buildings is the didactic component. Secular buildings, through architecture, should inspire the kinds of ideals a culture values, and I think this is the point he’s trying to make with his suggested atheist temple. De Botton wants to build a beautiful building that might speak to people and inspire them to achieve greater things both as individuals and as a part of a culture. But what I don’t understand is how he expects to achieve this by building a 46 meter black obelisk in the heart of London.

His temple design is a 46 meter tower, one centimeter for every million years of Earth’s existence, with a one millimeter sliver of gold at the base to signify the amount of time humans have existed on the planet. On its interior walls will be depictions of significant geologic features and other aspects of Earth science which can be graphically represented. It’s not clear if this building will be a place for folks to gather and relax and talk about science, or if it will be a solitary place for piety (whatever atheist piety might be). The whole thing has an air of an outdoor art installation by an eccentric sculptor who wants to try something serious for a change, but fails.

When I look for inspiration about my place in the cosmos, I don’t go into a building, I go outside and look at the stars. I investigate the strata of rocks on a hillside. I peer at the critters in the wetlands. I splash about in tidepools. I take walks in the woods and listen to birds sing. What I don’t do is go into a building to contemplate my navel. But that’s precisely what de Botton suggests we do with his obelisk to Earth’s history. The fictional obelisk in Kubrick’s vision of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 instills more awe in me than the notion of a dimly lit phallus in the center of London. A temple for atheists is a foolish idea.

Yet de Botton has a valid point, I think, in that we do need more inspiring architecture. But the only way we’re going to achieve that is to find something to which we can aspire. In the United States, I can guarantee that it’s not atheism that inspires people. We need to have hope that tomorrow will be more promising than today, but as long as people continue to cling to the values of bygone eras, or focus on material wealth over cultural richness, we’re going to continue to have dull, uninspiring architecture. Building a black obelisk to atheism is not going to inspire people. Building a new infrastructure, and investing in the future of our culture, is a far better plan.

Unfortunately, this post is actually an apology… Usually I am able to post something on skepticfreethought at least every other week. Recently I have not been posting because I have finally reached maximum capacity and I am crashing and burning. I took on too many responsibilities, I haven’t been delegating properly, and all systems are on alert.

I have many articles planned and ready for creation, but I haven’t had the time to write them or edit them. I will be posting them as soon as I get myself together. Meanwhile, here are some demotivationals I made and I hope will be an offering of peace and secular supplication…

 

I have a weird sense of humor but I hope at least one of these puts a smile on your face.

Once again, I am very sorry.

Until next time…

 

 

 

 

A while back I wrote a post saying that not only am I an atheist, but I am a nihilist as well. That is, not only do I not believe in god, I also do not believe in absolute morality or that there is intrinsic meaning to human life or even the existence of the universe. Now I’ve seen it argued by theists that it is impossible to be moral without a belief in god. So for me to go that one step further and claim that not only does god not exist, but neither does absolute morality, would be an inconceivable notion to the moral theist. I would likely be viewed as a vile, immoral monster who might believe that even unspeakable atrocities are permissible because, without morality, nothing is forbidden. But if I’m seen as such an immoral, atheistic, nihilistic monster, then why is it the believers who are so quick to issue death threats to those they disagree with?

Case in point: Last week in Cranston, Rhode Island, a prayer banner that had been hanging in the high school gymnasium since 1963 was ruled in violation of the First Amendment by a federal court and ordered to be taken down. The individual who recognized this Constitutional infraction was 16-year-old Jessica Ahlquist, who elected to be the plaintiff in the court case. When the ruling came down in her favor, the outrage from God’s Good People™ began. JesusFetusFajitaFishsticks has screencaps of several tweets from “moral Christians” spewing bile and threats at Jessica. It is truly disgusting what some of these people say.

At no point in my very secular upbringing was I ever taught to believe that threatening someone with bodily harm or death was an acceptable social behavior. If a nihilist like myself can understand how inappropriate and immoral it is to threaten someone’s life, then why can’t the so-called “moral” theists recognize it too? I want to understand how someone who is religious or a person of faith, and who uses their position as a religious person to claim that they are moral and ethical by reason of their faith alone, can justify spewing hate, intolerance, and even death threats at another human being. I’ve speculated as to how this could occur, though at this point I only have an unsubstantiated hypothesis.

In 1961, Stanley Milgram conducted psychological experiments in an effort to try and understand why people could have let the atrocities of the Holocaust happen. Milgram wanted to know how far would an individual go in inflicting physical harm upon another human being if there was someone in a position of authority there urging them to continue. The gist of the experiment was a questioner would ask a test taker, who was strapped into shock emitters in a separate room, a series of questions, and for every question the test taker got wrong, the questioner would administer a shock of increasing voltage going all the way up to 450 volts. Meanwhile, a technician in a lab coat and clipboard would stand over the questioner and urge them to continue with the experiment even if the test taker in the other room was screaming in agony to end the test. But the test taker was not really getting zapped. The experiment was to find out how far the questioner would go with administering the electric shocks at the insistence of the authority figure in the lab coat. As it turned out in the experiment, an alarming number of individuals administered the full shock of 450 volts three times even though the once screaming subject behind closed doors had long been silent. This demonstrated to Milgram that a person’s morality is flexible, and many people can be convinced to do horrible things to other human beings provided there is an authority figure there nudging them to do so.

But what does Milgram’s experiment have to do with religious believers issuing death threats? In the experiment, it was the insistence of an authority figure which pushed the individual out of their moral comfort zone and into the role of a sadistic order-follower. For the believer, there is no greater authority figure than that of god. With a clipboard of holy scriptures, this authority figure doesn’t even have to be present for its underlings to commit unspeakable acts. If a believer’s holy writ is challenged, then they can convince themselves that they have a moral obligation to silence the offending party by any means necessary. By this logic, the ends justify the means and the believers’ notion of being moral because they are believers remains true in their mind. The immoral act is to go against the authority figure by refusing to obey commands, or even denying the existence of the authority figure. Subsequently, God’s Good People™ shout out threats of injury or death to the unbeliever because their god in the flowing white lab coat urges them to continue pulling the levers because that what the experiment demands.

Absolute morality is as big a fantasy as god is, but that’s not to say that morality on a human scale does not exist. Human beings have existed for a long time on this Earth without holy writ telling us what to think. A species which would kill its own kind indiscriminately would not last long, which means there would have to be some kind of biological or cognitive process preventing us from committing genocide at the drop of a hat. I am an atheist and a nihilist, and yet I know that it is ethically and morally wrong to threaten another human being with injury or death. Considering the violence, murder, rape, slavery, war, and even genocide that happens in the Bible, it stands to reason that a believer could feel justified in their attacks. How far will a believer go when it’s morally acceptable for their god, their authority figure, to commit such atrocities? We have only to look at history to find the answer to that.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation will be filing a complaint alleging that Twins Florist of Cranston, Rhode Island for violating civil rights by discriminating on a delivery of flowers orders for Jessica Ahlquist because of her lack of religious belief.

Three other Cranston florists and more in Warwick all denied the FFRF, and they had to go the next state over, Connecticut, to get flowers delivered. Anne Laurie Gaylor of the FFRF said her foundation has a copy of the order receipt from Twin’s Florist that states “I will not deliver to this person.”

So this has been floating around the internet…

Thoughts?

What are your thoughts? Comment below.

I am a very visually oriented person. If you spew a bunch of numbers at me, I’ll most likely understand it in a series of pie charts and bar graphs in my head. Otherwise, forget it. I’ve been hearing about how terrible the national debt problem is, mostly on the radio. (Woo, NPR!) And I knew it was bad, but never really how bad. This really breaks it down and makes it easier to comprehend how utterly ridiculous this is.

Transcript:

The budget explained in simple English.

I love it when complex things are simplified so that we can all understand.

• United States Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cut: $38,500,000,000

Now, remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget.

• Annual family income: $21,700
• Money the family spent: $38,200
• New debt on the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on credit card: $142,710
• Total budget cuts which some politicians are proud about: $385

Stop the insanity now. Vote them out and demand a balanced budget.

Essentially, we as a metaphorical family, have terrible spending habits, over $150k in debt, and we’ve decided to cut the cable bill. This is not enough!! I think anyone with a 5th grade math education can see that this isn’t going to fix any debt problem.

I don’t have a solution to suggest here, I just think it’s important to understand how little our government is doing to fix this problem. They are using non-existent money that wrecks our national budget, and it needs to be fixed.

The origin of morality is a popular topic among both religious believers and skeptics. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a religious debate where this point has failed to come up. Many religious people, especially Christians, view the existence of a moral code as compelling evidence of their God’s existence, and will often reference the robust moral convictions of famous religious leaders to support that claim.

The most common contemporary example is Martin Luther King Jr., a revered Baptist minister and civil rights leader. King graduated high school at the age of 15 and, after earning two bachelor’s degrees, was awarded a PhD in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955. During that time he served as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and became an outspoken proponent of the American civil rights movement.  In 1964, King became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 35. King was a Christian leader who undoubtedly possessed a strong moral compass. However, it isn’t at all clear that his moral convictions arose from his religion.

In fact, MLK often boldly condemned the actions of the Christian Church.  As Jeff Nall points out in his profile of King’s religious beliefs, MLK roundly criticized many forms of organized religion, not only for its failure to support racial and economic equality (calling it Christianity’s “everlasting shame”), but also for its explicit support of war and violence.  King noted:

In a world gone mad with arms buildups, chauvinistic passions, and imperialistic exploitation, the church has either endorsed these activities or remained appallingly silent. During the last two world wars, national churches even functioned as the ready lackeys of the state, sprinkling holy water upon the battleships and joining the mighty armies in singing, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” A weary world, pleading desperately for peace, has often found the church morally sanctioning war.

Nall also points out that MLK was a strong supporter of church/state separation. Regarding the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that school-sponsored prayer is unconstitutional, King said:

I endorse it. I think it was correct. Contrary to what many have said, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor belief in God. In a pluralistic society such as ours, who is to determine what prayer shall be spoken, and by whom? Legally, constitutionally, or otherwise, the state certainly has no such right. I am strongly opposed to the efforts that have been made to nullify the decision.

But King didn’t limit his criticism to the church; he was also openly skeptical of the very foundations of Christan doctrine. Despite being the son of a Baptist minister, MLK challenged traditional views of Christianity and the literal interpretation of scripture from a very young age.  As Robert James Scofield describes in his profile of Martin Luther King Jr.’s religious doubts:

His entrance into Christianity at the age of six came from neither a genuine religious conviction nor a crisis moment; rather, he saw his sister make the altar call during a local religious revival and quickly followed suit. He claimed that during his baptism he had no idea what was occurring. Perhaps most striking was his denial of the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school at the age of thirteen. From this point he stated [...in his Biography], “doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.”

Those doubts were reinforced as King continued to explore the foundations of Christianity.  In a paper he wrote in 1949, King examined the psychological and historical origins of three foundational concepts of Christianity: The divinity of Jesus, his virgin birth, and his resurrection. While his analysis is worth reading in full, I’ll give away the punchline by telling you that King begins by stating, “these doctrines are historically and philolophically [sic] untenable.” He goes on to strip these stories of their literal meaning, and explore what it was about both the historical Jesus and the sociopolitical environment in which early Christianity was spreading that might have led to the propagation of such obvious inconsistencies and falsehoods as those found in the Bible.

King went on to exhibit other forms of skepticism about mainstream Christian doctrine, and even warned that it may be harmful. In 1950, King wrote a paper titled “The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus,” where he states:

The orthodox attempt to explain the divinity of Jesus in terms of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadequate. To say that the Christ, whose example of living we are bid to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is actually harmful and detrimental. To invest this Christ with such supernatural qualities makes the rejoinder: “Oh, well, he had a better chance for that kind of life than we can possibly have …” So that the orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied. The significance of the divinity of Christ lies in the fact that his achievement is prophetic and promissory for every other true son of man who is willing to submit his will to the will and spirit of God. Christ was to be only the prototype of one among many brothers.

The appearance of such a person, more divine and more human than any other, andstanding [sic] and standing in closest unity at once with God and man, is the most significant and hopeful event in human history. This divine quality or this unity with God was not something thrust upon Jesus from above, but it was a definite achievement through the process of moral struggle and self-abnegation. [Emphasis mine.]

In other words, King’s saw Christ’s “divinity” to have arisen through his good works, not because of his particular relationship to a deity. In this sense, it seems MLK is using an external definition of morality to evaluate Christ’s behaviors.

This is a reflection of what’s known as “The Euthyphro Dilemma,” which asks if something is good simply because it is God’s will, or if God wills something because it is good. Briefly, if the first statement is true, then morality is arbitrary, and anything a god does cannot, by definition, be immoral. Moral behavior therefore becomes a synonym for “God’s actions.”  However, if the second is true, then morality is independent of any gods, and therefore can’t be used as evidence of said gods.

As a secular humanist and an atheist, I believe that the foundations of morality are rooted in a concern for human welfare and are completely independent of religious belief. Martin Luther King Jr.’s opinions and writings suggest that he would agree with me.

 

Jessica Ahlquist of Providence, RI has been fighting a lawsuit with the ACLU against her high school for well over a year now. And finally Jessica Ahlquist has won her lawsuit. The breaking news was covered in the Providence Journal, followed by the Friendly Atheist’s coverage, including a 40-page decision from U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux (PDF).

Jessica’s appeal began early on with the creation of her facebook page to bring down the banner. Through her fight, she has inspired dozens of other high school students and community members to challenge their schools to take down visible prayers, stop school administration from condoning prayers at public school events, and more.

Her bravery in standing up for her legal rights has been an amazing feat, but her challenges aren’t over yet since her family is still receiving threats due to this passing. But we need to support brave students like Jessica in bringing schools in to following the separation of church and state. So if you can, support Jessica with a scholarship below:

Again, congratulations on your win and your continued bravery in fighting for our movement! We at Skeptic Freethought are all so proud of your efforts! Thank you!